Health official back on the job, still under investigation

Dr. Rajiv Bhatia has access to his work email now, but not his office or his files. (Photo courtesy of the Department of Public Health)

San Francisco’s lead environmental health official is back to work – sort of – after being placed on administrative leave June 17 amid a mysterious city investigation.

His forced six-week leave is over. The investigation is not.

So Dr. Rajiv Bhatia was back at the Department of Public Health on Monday, but he’s not allowed into his old office, nor is he back doing his old job, heading the department’s environmental health division. That’s where he oversaw programs like getting city restaurant food safety inspection scores on Yelp and a similar effort to post housing health and safety violations on sites like Trulia and social media platforms.

“I’m back on the job, but I’m not allowed to do my usual work,” Bhatia said. “We’re discussing alternative assignments while the department continues its investigation.”

So far, Bhatia, the health department and the city attorney’s office, whose investigators are handling the inquiry, won’t say what the investigation is about.

A letter from the health department instructing Bhatia to return to work only describes the case as “alleged misconduct” and says “the investigation is taking longer than we anticipated.”

Bhatia’s attorney, Dan Siegel, said the investigation appears to be a fishing expedition.

“It seems very strange and even backward to me that the city has to look so hard for evidence of alleged misconduct, because they should have had such evidence before they put Dr. Bhatia on leave,” Siegel said. “Being in the interviews with him, it seems like the investigators are fumbling around looking for something. … They were asking lots of questions that did not suggest any misconduct at all, and they were not very well-informed questions.”

Part of Bhatia’s job coordinating programs to address food safety, smoking bans, lead exposure and bed bugs requires forming cooperative relationships with other government entities, foundations and nonprofits, Siegel said.

“A fair amount of the questions seemed to be based on the idea that Dr. Bhatia, by doing the work that I just described, has created dome kind of conflict of interest, which seems completely backwards,” Siegel said.

Eileen Shields, a department spokeswoman, said she couldn’t comment on Bhatia’s situation because it’s a personnel matter. The department, in a statement, did confirm Bhatia was back and working on “public health projects.”

In the midst of his suspension, 93 public health figures from universities, nonprofits, health departments and other organizations sent a letter to Mayor Ed Lee praising Bhatia’s work as groundbreaking efforts “modeled by city, county, state and federal agencies around the country.”

Bhatia’s suspension came after what some who work closely with the Department of Public Health have characterized as a brain drain under director Barbara Garcia, who was tapped in October 2010 to take over the department when her predecessor, Mitch Katz, got the top job at the Los Angeles County health department.

At least nine senior officials have left the department since then, staff said, including three who followed Katz to Los Angeles and a fourth, Dr. Grant Colfax, who was named the director of the Office of National AIDS Policy in the White House.

San Francisco’s Department of Public Health “has a national and world-wide reputation for innovative solutions to traditional public health problems,” said a source at a nonprofit that works with the Department of Public Health who requested anonymity to preserve that relationship.

“I’m concerned that the current leadership is fostering an environment that is driving out and stifling that innovation to the detriment of us all,” the source said.

This comes as the department for years has had structural budget deficits. It’s also facing one of its biggest hurdles to date, implementing federal health care reform under the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.